By Cancún, I mean the region more than the city– the closest we got to the actual city of Cancún was the airport. A lot of the resorts are in an area called the “hotel zone,” which, based on the pictures and video I’ve seen, seems a little more like the Vegas strip. If we were to come here again, I might be more inclined to stay in one of those places, though I suspect there’d be a whole lot more people and noise and foolishness. Oh also, fun fact I didn’t realize until I looked it up while writing this post: Cancún was built by the Mexican government in the 1970s specifically to bring in tourism.
We stayed in an area referred to as the Mayan Riviera, an area along the ocean and south of the city that is lined with all-inclusive resorts. We stayed at Dreams Riviera Cancún, which I think is a fairly average kind of example of these sorts of places. Dreams is a chain of all-inclusive resorts (think maybe the average person’s White Lotus) that I believe is owned by Hyatt. It’s around 20 miles from Cancún itself, tucked back off of the main road and along the coast, surrounded by jungle with other resorts.
This was a “family-friendly” resort, so there were a lot more kids around than I was planning on, but it was mostly fine. I suppose we could have stayed at an “adults only” place, but some of those places seem a little swarmy to me. Hard for me to estimate, but I think around half the people at the resort were from the US; it seemed at least as popular with people from Mexico and other places around the world. When we were checking in, at least four different staff members asked if we were here for a wedding and in the time we were at this relatively small place, there was at least four different weddings. I guess holding a wedding at an all-inclusive resort like this is very popular down here.
The main activity at the resort was sitting in the sun, wallowing in the pools, drinking lots of watered-down cocktails, people-watching, and eating. It’s not unlike the at sea days on a cruise ship. We had about a half a day of that on Monday and Friday (our travel days) and all day Tuesday and Thursday. My sense is that a lot of people come here for around a week and this is all they do. I am far too antsy for that, but it was enjoyable enough for two days.
Besides the resort, the main activity we had was an all-day trip to Chichen Itza. Fantastic experience, though a really long day– we left our hotel around 7:30 am and didn’t get back until about 9 pm– and that was mostly spent on the bus. Our first brief stop after about two hours on the road was in Valladolid, mostly to stretch our legs and to look around at the lovely town square, the 16th century buildings that lined it, and an impressive church the Spanish had built from the rocks of a Mayan temple they destroyed.
Then we stopped for shopping and lunch at a place specifically set up for tour busses like ours. It looked like our tour company had a monopoly on the place for at least the day because there were three or four other tour busses from the same company stopped when we were there. The tour workers, all men and some of them older than I would have expected, sat together for lunch, which seemed like a regular thing.
And then the main attraction, Chichen Itza. We were at the site only for a couple of hours, but that was enough to get at least a sense of the place. The tour guide gave us a lot of details I’ll skip now about the Mayans– the complexities of their calendar system, their knowledge of astronomy (the main temple, called in Spanish El Castillo, was designed such that on the spring equinox, the light from the rising sun descends down one of the sides and the light/shadow looks like the body of a snake), the numerology, the role of the “ballgame” that was played here (and throughout what is now Mexico and Central America), how human sacrifices worked, so on and so forth. One of the many things I didn’t realize until this trip is that Chichen Itza and the Mayan civilization had mostly collapsed for various reasons hundreds of years before the Spanish arrived. There were still Mayan native people living in the area, but the city and the temples were largely abandoned by then.
Annette came to Chichen Itza twice in the late 1980s/early 1990s (it’s a longer story she can tell), and a lot has changed. For one thing, they used to let tourists climb up the steps to the top of El Castillo; that stopped in the early 2000s. The other thing our guide told us is that when Chichen Itza was named one of the “new” modern wonders of the world, tourism blew up. Now there are hundreds of tour buses coming to the site every day, and there are also hundreds of vendors on the grounds selling every Mexican souvenir you can think of.
We got back on the bus and went to the last stop, which was a cenote which was in/next to a complex that had some stores and a restaurant, and also a bunch of spaces for big events like weddings and conventions. Apparently, there are thousands of these cenotes in the Yucatán Peninsula, some quite large and most filled with water. While there were several people in our group who did swim (they have changing rooms at the site), we did not. I don’t know how to swim, but beyond that, it seemed like a lot of trouble for getting into the water for maybe 20 minutes. It was quite beautiful though. Then back on the bus and the very long ride back to the resort.
It was a fun five days, definitely. Would I do it again? Hard to say.
The resort was lovely, the beaches and weather were great, the service was spectacular, no question. It was indeed “all-inclusive,” which is different from a cruise ship where they add on a 15-20% gratuity charge to the final bill. However, I did notice a lot of people passing their waiters or bartenders a dollar here and there to keep the drinks coming quicker.
A lot of the downsides for me are similar to the problems of cruises. I don’t think the other patrons of either of these experiences are “my kind of people,” if that makes sense. The service can be a little too fawning, which did make me feel like a (comparatively) rich American exploiting the poor workers picking up my towels and making my drinks. There’s a lot of wasted food and resources.
And I didn’t think much of the quality of the food or the booze. Annette thinks I’m just too much of a food snob, and maybe she has a point. I know a lot of people rave about the great food on cruise ships, but I’ve always thought it was basically the best cafeteria food you’ve ever eaten. To me, this was at least a notch below that.
So yes, this trip was a lot of fun, but I still have a lot of mixed feelings. If I were to do something like this again, I might try to push for a place with better food– if such a place exists and is in our budget. Or I might suggest a cruise instead, which does have the advantage of taking you to things to see and do beyond just a place to hang out.